Sostenes Peter Manyama and ex-fiancée, Rhodiesha Kampher are on trial for the rape and murder of 5-year-old Linathi Solontyi.
Jacques Stander/Gallo Images
- A man on trial for the murder of a child he thought was his own has accused the State of fabricating evidence against him to take the spotlight off his co-accused.
- His co-accused is his ex-fiancée, and they were living together when the child died.
- Sostenes Peter Manyama says the State is treating the ex-fiancée like a witness instead of a murder accused.
The man on trial for the rape and murder of a child he thought was his daughter has accused the State of ganging up on him.
During his trial at the Western Cape High Court on Tuesday, Sostenes Peter Manyama said the State had fabricated a new docket to focus on him more than his co-accused.
Five-year-old Linathi Solontyi died while living with Manyama and his ex-fiancée, Rhodiesha Kampher, at their home in Mfuleni, Cape Town.
The child started living with the couple when Manyama’s ex-girlfriend dropped her off at their home, saying she was jobless and struggling, and neither she nor her mother could look after the child anymore.
Manyama thought Solontyi was his daughter and had looked after her previously when the child’s grandmother had to go out of town.
READ | ‘Don’t talk. Change now, please’: Man accused of child murder sends notes to co-accused ex
The couple gave the birth mother money for food. She gave them Solontyi’s birth certificate and they never saw her again.
Kampher and Manyama had punishing schedules.
She worked a 12-hour swing shift as a home-based carer while his primary job was at a panel beating shop.
Before going to work at the panel beating shop, Manyama would run a scholar transport service, and then did staff transport for a restaurant at the V&A Waterfront after supper.
Solontyi was admitted to the hospital in Elsie’s River on 21 September 2019 with a serious head injury and was transferred to the Red Cross War Memorial Children’s Hospital for specialist care.
Kampher said Solontyi had lost her footing and tumbled down a dimly lit flight of steps at home, hence her injuries.
Nurses and doctors had their suspicions, and before Solontyi died, a paediatrician conducted a thorough examination of her injuries, and what he found shocked him.
The girl was too heavily sedated to speak, so her body told the story of her short but tragic life.
She had lesions, bruises and marks all over her body, old wounds on her head, marks that looked like cigarette burns, lesions on the inside of her legs, and she showed signs of previous sexual abuse. She was unwashed and her feet were filthy with fungus between her toes.
The girl was behind the milestones expected for her age; she was jumpy; and could only speak isiXhosa, so communication with her was difficult in English and Afrikaans, the couple’s home languages.
She died in hospital as a result of a traumatic brain injury on 17 October 2019.
Manyama subsequently discovered through a DNA test that Solontyi was not his daughter.
Kampher and Manyama were charged with child abuse and murder. Manyama was also charged with rape.
Kampher pleaded guilty to child abuse, but only to the extent of not reporting abuse.
She claimed that she saw Manyama rape Solontyi, and her defence was that she was too scared of him to tell anyone or intervene.
She said she could finally open up when speaking to a prison psychologist after police arrested her.
She and Manyama pleaded not guilty to the charge of murder, and Manyama also pleaded not guilty to rape.
Manyama has alleged that Solontyi was abused at her grandmother’s house in Macassar, not at their home.
On Monday, he was cross-examined by Kampher’s defence lawyer Susanna Kuun.
During long-winded answers, he alleged that the state had lost his docket and then created a new one with different claims that made him responsible for Solontyi’s death.
He claimed there were also two different statements from Kampher on what happened to Solontyi.
He claimed that the first statement that was taken by a social worker put two children playing at the scene of Solontyi’s last injury.
In the second, he said, Solontyi is alone and walks to the toilet and then trips.
He exclaimed that on the day the child was hurt so badly that she had to go to a hospital:
He also accused the State of treating Kampher more like a witness than an accused.
When challenged to back up his claims of foul play, Manyama said all would be revealed as the trial progresses.
The trial continues.